FANUC to Offer New IIoT Platform for Major Automotive Manufacturers ENGINEERING.com

FANUC Corp. is teaming up with Cisco, Rockwell Automation and Preferred Networks (PFN) to develop and deploy the FANUC Intelligent Edge Link and Drive (FIELD) system for major automotive manufacturers. The new Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform will expand upon the FANUC ZDT (Zero Downtime) project to connect not only CNC machines and industrial robots, but also peripheral devices and sensors for greater analytical data to improve overall equipment efficiency (OEE) and increase profitability. "With a secure scalable compute approach to analyze this data--from device to the enterprise--users can improve operations and make more informed decisions tailored to meet the needs of their organizations," said Sujeet Chand, CTO of Rockwell Automation. The Allen-Bradley Stratix Ethernet switches from Rockwell Automation will be used to connect FANUC robots to Cisco's ZDT Data Collection software. PFN provides the FIELD system with an open deep-learning framework (Chainer), an IoT Stream Engine (SensorBee) and other machine learning libraries within its Deep Intelligence in-Motion (DIMo) platform.